By Robert Wolff <wolffr@mail.ccsu.edu>, Department of History,
Central Connecticut State University, 29 June 2000

Reviewed for EH.Net by Robert Wolff <wolffr@mail.ccsu.edu>,
Department of History, Central Connecticut State University

Walter Johnson's _Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum
Slave Market_ traces the human history of the slave trade in
the United States. Designed as both complement to, and
measured criticism of, economic and demographic approaches
to the slave trade, _Soul by Soul_ begins with the claim
that, "we must now consider the roads, rivers, and showrooms
where broad trends and abstract totalities thickened into
human shape. To the epochal history of the slave market must
be added the daily stories of the slave pens, the history of
sales made and unmade in the contingent bargaining of
trader, buyer, and slave" (p. 8). By placing enslaved
African Americans at the center of analysis, Johnson shifts
the scholarly focus on the slave market from aggregate
numerical measures to the chilling day-to-day commerce in
human beings. _Soul by Soul_ indicts the antebellum South on
its own terms, meticulously dismantling the slaveholders'
world. According to Johnson, the market served as the
foundation of the planters' fantastic and frightening
worldview in which they "imagined who they could be by
thinking about whom they could buy" (p. 79).

What distinguishes _Soul by Soul_ from other recent works on
the experience of slavery, and, indeed, the history of the
antebellum South, is the innovative use of court records.
Johnson, an assistant professor of history at New York
University, begins by asserting the importance of seeing the
moment of sale through the eyes of the people who were sold
and not just through the eyes of slaveowners and traders. A
careful reading of the voluminous quantity of published
slave narratives forms the foundation of the volume but much
of the insight comes from an exploration of roughly two
hundred disputed slave transactions that were brought before
the Louisiana Supreme Court. Under so-called "redhibition"
laws, slave buyers dissatisfied with the people they had
bought could sue the seller. Louisiana law forced slave
traders to warranty these sales in cases where the buyer was
deceived or misled regarding a slave's physical health or
"character." [See Judith K. Schafer, _Slavery, the Civil
Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana_ (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1997) for more information
on the legal history of slavery.] Johnson makes excellent
use of these documents, and others, to describe the physical
spaces and transactions of the slave trade. Far from the
image of the "slave auctions" that figured so prominently in
abolitionist accounts, the slave markets cloaked their
transactions in civility as they clothed slaves to reflect
buyers' desire. Traders displayed enslaved African Americans
for inspection in genteel showrooms, set apart from the
slave pens in which they were imprisoned. And it was in
these showrooms that sellers and buyers displayed their
"knowledge" of slave bodies, reading them for signs of
punishment and disease, extrapolating character traits and
physical abilities from their faces, hands, limbs, and
breasts, and all the while defining through these acts their
own honor, manhood and mastery.

The public transcript of disputed slaves sales allows
Johnson to create what might be termed, following James
Scott, the "hidden transcript" of the market transactions in
human bodies. [James C. Scott, _Domination and the Arts of
Resistance: Hidden Transcripts_ (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1990).] Johnson examines all of his documents --
including slaveholders' writings -- to describe what the
sales meant to the parties concerned, whether it was the
traders' ambitions, the slaveholders' desires, or the
slaves' fears. Through his careful reading of the evidence
emerge the slaves' own narratives of sale. Johnson's
evocative language describes the bitter ironies of a market
in which African Americans were "alienated . . . from their
own bodies" and forced "to perform their own
commodification" (pp. 163-164). Here they were often faced
with impossible choices, for example whether to confirm a
dealer's embellished account of their own abilities or not,
when either course of action could lead to a beating.
Nevertheless, _Soul by Soul_ argues that precisely because
slave deals invariably relied upon the slaves' own
presentation of their bodies and minds, slaves had the
ability to shape the moment of sale. At great risk to
themselves, they could selectively confirm or deny sellers'
claims based on their own reading of the potential buyer.
They could declare their intentions to run away or harm
themselves if certain conditions were not met, such as being
sold with family members. On the margin slaves could hope
for a beneficent master living within the city and struggle
to avoid a cruel master who owned a sugar plantation. Again,
at peril of their own lives, slaves could continue this
struggle past the point of sale in an effort -- through
faking illness or developing "bad" traits -- to induce their
masters to use the redhibition laws to return them to the
markets. There are times in the narrative where this seems
to be at best a pyrrhic victory. Yet in one of the most
significant passages Johnson concludes: "Placed on a scale
between slavery and freedom or judged according to a theory
that accepts revolution as the only meaningful goal of
resistance, these slave-shaped sales do not look like much:
as many skeptics have put it, 'after all, they were still
enslaved.' But placed between subordination and resistance
on the scale of daily life, these differences between
possible sales had the salience of survival itself" (p.
187).

The possibility of being sold is what set chattel slavery
apart from other forms of coerced labor. _Soul by Soul_
demonstrates that slaveholders had a far greater affinity
for cash than for any individual slave. In so doing it
demolishes the lingering romanticism that still pervades
much of the literature on the Old South. In particular,
_Soul by Soul_ questions whether there ever was a Southern
paternalism that, in Eugene Genovese's words, "implicitly
recognized the slaves' humanity" or established a truly
"mutual" set of obligations between master and slave.
[Eugene Genovese, _Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves
Made_ (reprint ed., New York: Vintage Books, 1976), p. 5.]
According to Johnson, violence against slaves, often
irrational and unpredictable, was the "essence of that grim
mutuality," not a "violation" of it (p. 206). When slaves
were beaten, it was for violating the master's vision of his
or her own world which was constructed, both literally and
figuratively, by the slaves themselves. Slaveholders, as
Michael Tadman has also demonstrated, crafted elaborate
myths that have obscured the cold calculations of the
market. [Michael Tadman, _Speculators and Slaves: Masters,
Traders, and Slaves in the Old South_ (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1989).] _Soul by Soul_ demonstrates that
far too much of the historical literature has obscured those
cold calculations as well.

No research is without flaws, and no scholar impervious to
the claim that something should have been done differently.
Johnson carefully crafts his narrative to acknowledge the
strengths and weaknesses of his evidence. For example,
Johnson wisely reads the court records as contingent
evidence, which is to say, he does not take the accounts
contained therein as literal truth. Court depositions and
testimony do reflect the realm of the possible. People
presented arguments that were plausible; if they were not
true in the specifics, they were always framed in a way that
made them possibly so. Similarly, he acknowledges that the
slave narratives were always survivors' stories. Most slaves
died in bondage. Is _Soul by Soul_ really, as Johnson
claims, "the story of the making of the antebellum South"
(p. 18)? Yes, in large measure it is. Johnson's narrative
does possess a self-admitted timelessness which makes it
difficult to see whether time and place matter. It may be
that this story is unique to Louisiana in the late
antebellum period, but this would hardly lessen the volume's
significance. New Orleans was a critical site in the slave
trade, and Louisiana slaveholders epitomized much of the
southern gentry. By focusing on the moment of sale, and
analyzing what it meant to both slaveowner and slave, _Soul
by Soul_ establishes itself as perhaps the most innovative
work on slavery published in the last twenty-five years.

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